June 11th, 2014 by Adam Armstrong

Panasas Unveils ActiveStor 16 and PanFS 6.0

Panasas has unveiled the ActiveStor 16 hybrid storage appliance and the operating system PanFS 6.0. ActiveStor 16 is a new hybrid scale-out NAS appliance scalable up to 12 petabytes (PB) of capacity and up to 150GB/s data throughput. PanFS is the latest version of Panasas OS that comes with RAID 6+ triple parity protection.

The ActiveStor 16 combines cost efficient disk-based storage with additional flash capacity with metadata performance. Leveraging HGST UltraStar He6 6TB drives, the ActiveStor 16 can have up to 122.4TB per 4U shelf and come with an additional 240GB of SSD. It also comes with a 2.53GHz quad-core processor and 48GB of cahce.

All this capacity and power is designed to work hand in hand with the new OS PanFS 6.0. PanFS gives users RAID6+ triple parity protection giving 150x higher reliability than dual parity approaches, protecting against two simultaneous drive failures and single sector errors on multiple drives. Reliability will increase with scale, not decrease. PanFS 6.0 allows restoration of specific files for disaster recovery as opposed to the whole file system.

Panasas is taking orders for the ActiveStor 16 now with an expected ship date in September. Prices and capacities are: $130,000 for the 82.4TB and $160,000 for the 122.4TB. PanFS will be available in September for the ActiveStor 11, 12, 14, & 16 at no additional cost.